Of course the people of the world--all decent people everywhere and for all time--regret the Nazi holocaust. We regret all the horrors of the past and present: slavery, torture, injustice, genocide, child abuse, murder, rape, plague, famine--the list goes on and on--the trans-Atlantic slave trade, torture and death for public amusement in ancient Rome, child labor in the Industrial Revolution, slavery in ancient Greece, surgical procedures without anaesthesia on prisoners in China, American persecution of Indians, English persecution of the Irish, the Inquisition, slavery and torture and death by stoning in contemporary Islamic theocracites, "honor killings", the genocides in Rawanda, the Bataan Death March and inhuman treatment of prisoners of war under Imperial Japan, the Pol Pot regime...the list goes on and on and on...
Of course decent people regret such horrors. We regret injustice and all the horrors of life.
But we must not feel guilty about such things. Guilt, like pain, is useful only if it spurs us to meaningful action. Otherwise, guilt is self-defeating.
The first thing we must do is insist on truth and honesty--something that Leftists find difficult, and often impossible, to do.
Then we must resolve to do everything we can to prevent such things' happening again in the future--although, considering the past as prophesy, we must face the truth about the difficult of implementing this resolve.
And we must resolve that we--as individuals--will never participate in the implementation of such horrors.
There is as much good as evil in human nature--probably more--but we must never overlook the potential for evil within ourselves. Only by acknowledging it and resolving never to allow the evil within ourselves to become manifest can we prevent it.
Mother Teresa said that she decided to go to Calcutta when she looked inside herself and saw a Hitler lurking there.
This monster is within all of us, and only by recognizing it and resolving to prevent its becoming manifest in our actions can we save ourselves--and others--from the potential for evil.
The price of goodness--like liberty--is eternal vigilance.
And murky, sloppy logic and mendacity encourage--rather than discourage--evil.
"There is as much good as evil in human nature--probably more--but we must never overlook the potential for evil within ourselves. Only by acknowledging it and resolving never to allow the evil within ourselves to become manifest can we prevent it."
I see a usual response to the idea of the Jewish holocaust uniqueness - that a life is a life, and a Tutu, or a Cambodian, or a Gipsy, or anybody murdered by any -ism in the XX century is worthy a remembrance equally. Yes, true. Still, there is a reason why Jewish holocaust stands out among other evils. Its because it was perpetrated by a supposedly highly civilized society. There is only a handful of nations who could rival Germans in 1900 in the arena of human accomplishments: in business, science, music, industry, cinema, work ethic, comfort of living, arts - mixed and varied accomplishments. And then, before the eyes of one living generation, they perpetrated an industrial scale evil. I understand that its not PC and is a bigotry of low expectations that crimes of Japanese militarists, Khmer ruge, Hutus, Stalinists, Maoists, etc, etc might take a second place to German's first. IMHO, its that none of them were on the top of the world as high as Germans. How somebody so cultured is capable of such evil is mind-boggling. (like when a carrier criminal kills somebody its on page 12, if an upstanding citizen does - its page 1). Even from Jewish own experience in the WWI, German occupation forces in Ukraine, for example, were remarkably better than reds, whites, or miscellaneous local powers taking over during the Civil War there. Then in WWII they were totally different species.
Once again, the above is not to diminish sufferings of anybody else. To me, we need more reminder about all them, not less. My point is that the speed itself of Germans degrading from the top of the world, culturally and all, to the all infecting evil, is horrifying.